This morning, self answered a Bookshouse tweet that asked: What kind of books make you cry while reading them?

She wanted to say: Almost every book.

Or she could have said: Angst-y books.

Instead, she decided to name a book. No, it was not The Subtle Knife, though that book certainly did make her cry. It was Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. Because of the character of the wife.

Like Dead Letters (which she compares almost every book to, now), it’s a mystery. While Dead Letters gives us closure on the very last page, In the Lake of Woods doesn’t give us even that much. Read at your own risk! O’Brien executes the wife’s point of view so well.

The piece was about Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who chose to dis-engage from the world by doing 10 days of vipassana meditation in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar.

Over an 18-tweet thread, Dorsey wrote about his experiences during the 10 days of silence, covering everything from a Silicon Valley-fied description of Buddhism (“hack the deepest layer of the mind and re-program it”) to the 117 mosquito bites he got while silently meditating in a cave, which he apparently silently counted, silently photographed, and silently compared to the heartrate data silently recorded by his Apple Watch, which he wore in meditation-friendly airplane mode.

The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik on Sarah Huckabee Sanders and who deserves a place at the table:

Never before in American politics has there been so plausible a reason for exclusion from the common meal as the act of working for Donald Trump.

@realDonaldTrump:

The Red Hen restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!

In March, the Donald toured the border wall, and the Attorney General flew to places like Las Cruces, New Mexico. Thank God for Jerry Brown.

Addressing the U.S. Attorney General, Brown said: “I’ll cooperate, Jeff, if you can get off this current maneuver you’re on, because it’s unbecoming.”

“California v. Trump”, by Connie Bruck

Early this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared war on the State of California. At least that’s the way many opponents of the Trump’s Administration saw it. Speaking to the California Peace Officers Association in Sacramento, Sessions announced that the Department of Justice was suing the state for passing three laws to protect undocumented immigrants — measures, Sessions said, that “intentionally obstruct the work of our sworn immigation-enforcement officers.”

Earlier, self had watched the AG on TV make a rhetorical device of “How dare you?” and finish up with, “California, we are coming to get you.”

While 45 seems lost in his own alternate reality of The Apprentice (“You’re fired” seems to be his favorite slogan), Sessions is lost in his own version of a western, where the Good Guys (Whites, self presumes) battle it out with Bad Guys (Native Americans, self presumes — aka, Non-Whites). The “coming to get you” had her rolling on the floor, because Sessions in person is rather petite in stature. And moreover, has elf ears. The idea of him as a gunslinger is patently ridiculous. But, it must have been an image dear to his heart, his own private childhood fantasy. And now he gets to act it out! On behalf of a President who likes talking loud and waving a big stick! As if the whole country — nay, the whole world — could be reduced to black and white! Or, if you prefer, white and white!

It’s a ridiculous performance.

Some weeks ago, Brown hit back with a tweet of his own:

Thanks for the shout-out, @realDonaldTrump. But bridges are still better than walls. And California remains the 6th largest economy in the world and the most prosperous state in America. #Facts

Self didn’t get to see the final episode. She’s here in Mendocino, reading tweets.

She didn’t get to watch last week’s episode either, but there were lots of tweets about CATS. Wait, what?

Then, there was almost a Twitter silence. For about five minutes. Which meant, everyone was watching and something was going down.

This evening, the tweet-storm began with something about coulottes. Sara?

Oh my GOD! THE CAT! I wanna unsee that so hard rn

I have anxiety.

I don’t understand why they had you go through with that charade. Laszlo could not have shaken them some other way? So what if they followed? They couldn’t be less conspicuous than Roosevelt and his horsemen.

Okay so that’s him.

I suspect there’s something about this opera specifically that mirrors the plot of this episode. If only I understood Italian opera . . .

Geez, does EVERYBODY carry around a chloroform-laden rag with them?

Nothing like going after a brutal serial killer in your opera’s finest.

From uranium ore to enlightening and instructive books like How To Avoid Huge Ships, you can buy pretty much anything via Amazon. Heck, they’ll even unlock the door to your home and leave the package inside for you now. But what happens when the product you buy is your home?

Self spent a few minutes looking at the available pre-fab tiny homes sold on Amazon. Here’s the one mentioned in the AD article.